I survived the first online lecture. At first I was terrified. I didn’t know what to expect. This is Chinese. A complete different language from English. A language that everyone always told me was really difficult to learn. Sure it doesn’t look easy, but I’ve never been one to take the easy route. So here I am, glad that I finally took the plunge to start learning a completely foreign language to me.
The first thing I worried about is being unable to write using Chinese characters. Luckily my computer was kind enough not to make things complicated. With one obstacle out of the way things were looking good.
The class required a camera and headphones with a microphone. I had just purchased a new lap top bag that came with all that. One less thing to worry about.
Logging on to the online lecture I felt a little bit intimidated, frightened, concerned about how it was all going to look like. Thankfully, the lecturer was friendly and helpful throughout and made the two hour lecture enjoyable. It was nice to see the faces of all the people I will be learning with over the next three months. Ah, technology what would we do without you.
One thing I am certain of is that learning Chinese is going to take a lot of effort. I like the fact that there are no tenses to learn and that the words are monosyllable, and most of the punctuation is the same. What does worry me a little bit are the tones. Getting a tone wrong can change the meaning of what you say. Hopefully, with practice even the tones will become simple. Fingers crossed.
您好！ 我叫Katarzyna.
